To: XEmacs Beta Testers <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org>
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull, XEmacs 21.5 Beta Engineer" <stephen@xemacs.org>
Subject: XEmacs 21.5.27 "fiddleheads" is released.
Organization: The XEmacs Project
* XEmacs 21.5.27 "fiddleheads" is released.
"fiddleheads" is the twenty-eighth in the VEGETABLE series.
The successor to XEmacs 21.5.26 "endive", "fiddleheads" adds fixes for
two annoying bugs by Stephen Turnbull. Fixing a historical design error
in the geometry eliminated the display jitter observed when maximizing
an XEmacs frame under several window managers including metacity and
kwin. One user reports continuing trouble with kwin, but says that it
appears to be a problem of kwin. Several others report that the jitter
is fixed under one or more window managers they used. Better handling of
Xft font resources in lwlib allows specification of the font for the
buffers tab widget via X resource. There remain some issues in this area.
Steve also provided a new node on "Xft Font Customization" in the User's
Guide.
Aidan Kehoe ported the GNU Emacs facility for identifying the source file
of built-in identifiers in introspective functions like `describe-function'
and `find-function'. He also changed the Lisp reader to accept Unicode
code points rather than Mule characters in read-quoted-character (based on
a suggestion by Pete Forman), and added the "\u" and "\U" escapes for
Unicode code points in the Lisp read syntax for characters and strings.
Joachim Schrod provided a better heuristic for detecting ISO 8859 text,
which should reduce the incorrect identification of ISO 8859 texts as Big5
dramatically. The heuristic is carefully tuned to not cause the reverse
problem, but users of Asian two-byte scripts should watch for errors in
idetification.
Tony Bennett contributed a patch to the code which handles process output.
This should speed up some process handling by as much as two orders of
magnitude for cases where the old code was extremely inefficient.
Jerry James added support for older versions of ALSA, based on a report by
Ilya Golubev.
Of course, there was the usual array of small improvements and bug fixes.
*Important Notices*
There are reports of problems with geometry management, likely due to
fixing the "metacity maximize" bug. These are separate bugs uncovered
by that fix, so the patch probably will not be reverted. However, you
can restore the previous behavior by setting the Lisp variable
`wedge-metacity' to a non-nil value. Either way, please report such
problems as a bug, and say whether changing the value of `wedge-metacity'
helps resolve them.
The broken patchkit xemacs-21.5.25-21.5.26.patch.gz and its detached
GPG signature have been replaced. I apologize for the inconvenience.
There are a number of undiagnosed crashes lurking, especially on the
x86_64 platform. A number of 64-bit bugs have been fixed, so it's
possible they've been fixed en passant, but since they're undiagnosed,
please be prudent, save often, and back up your essential data.
* About the XEmacs 21.5 series.
This is the development line. The current series started with XEmacs 21.5.0
(an alias for XEmacs 21.4.0 "Solid Vapor", the first release in the current
stable line). 21.5 is the code base for introduction of major new subsystems
and fixes to design bugs that experience shows will introduce instability.
So far the main effort has been on improved support for Unicode, updates to
the build infrastructure, and development of new features in memory allocation.
For general information about XEmacs, the developers, and the user community,
see our home page,
http://www.xemacs.org/
* XEmacs 21.5.27 is "beta" software.
The usual "no warranty" disclaimer (see etc/WARRANTY, sections 10 and 11)
applies. At this point in time, it is the version that most developers
are using for their daily work. However, it is certain that many bugs
remain and new ones will be introduced as development proceeds. Be sure
to take care to save your work often and follow a regular backup regime.
Note that part of the release process involves a full build and test cycle,
with no regressions. However, one build on the release engineer's host is
all the quality assurance that is done for most beta releases. Be sure to
checkpoint a known good version of XEmacs (eg, a CVS tag or tarball) before
overwriting your XEmacs source tree.
* Availability
Anonymous ftp:
ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-21.5
See http://www.xemacs.org/Install/ for more information about building
from source.
If you already have a 21.5.26 source tree, a patchkit is available in
xemacs-21.5.26-21.5.27.patch.gz. This does not update .elcs or .infos,
they will be rebuilt when you make XEmacs. If you have an earlier
version, you can repeatedly apply patchkits.
We thank our hosts at Tux.org, and numerous mirrors around the world,
for providing space and bandwidth for distributing XEmacs.
Also, if you don't have the packages yet, see
http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/packageGuide.html.
Anonymous (pserver) CVS:
Anonymous CVS is available. We are very grateful to the staff at our
host, dotsrc.org (formerly SunSITE.dk), for a lot of help and quick
response to all our requests.
Take care that your Root is set correctly to
CVSROOT=:pserver:cvs@cvs.xemacs.org:/pack/xemacscvs
On platforms with a Bourne shell and find available, something like
for r in `find . -name Root`; do echo $CVSROOT > $r; done
will convert your entire tree.
To make it straightforward to access certain versions of the code, we have
a standard tagging policy. To update to release 21.5.27, use the update
flag "-r r21-5-27". To update to the current release without referring to
it specifically, use the flag "-r r21-5-current-beta". To update to the
latest commits in CVS, use the flag "-A". Then rebuild XEmacs.
For more details, see
http://www.xemacs.org/Develop/cvsaccess.html
or the ViewCVS interface at
http://cvs/xemacs.org .